Artists fed up with AI-image generators use Mickey Mouse to goad copyright lawsuits

Artists Protest AI Art by Generating Images of Mickey Mouse

archived 17 Dec 2022 20:18:28 UTC

archive.ph

Artists fed up with AI-image generators use Mickey Mouse to goad copyright lawsuits

Artists are pushing back on imagery generated by AI by using the technology to create content containing copyrighted Disney characters.

www.dailydot.com

tl;dr artists are trying to shoot themselves in both feet by giving megacorps stronger copyright power

Artists are pushing back on imagery generated by artificial intelligence (AI) by using the technology to create content containing copyrighted Disney characters.


Since the introduction of AI systems including DALL·E 2, Lensa AI, and Midjourney, artists have argued that such tools steal their work, given that they’ve been fed an endless supply of their pieces as inputs. Many such tools, for example, can be told to create imagery in the style of a particular artist.

The current legal consensus, much to the chagrin of many artists, concludes that AI-generated art is in the public domain and therefore not copyrighted. In the terms of service for systems such as DALL·E 2, created by the research laboratory OpenAI, users are told that no images are copyrighted despite being owned by OpenAI.

In response to concerns over the future of their craft, artists have begun using AI systems to generate images of characters including Disney’s Mickey Mouse. Given Disney’s history of fierce protection over its content, the artists are hoping the company takes action and thus proves that AI art isn’t as original as it claims.


Over the weekend, Eric Bourdages, the Lead Character Artist on the popular video game Dead by Daylight, urged his followers to create and sell merchandise using the Disney-inspired images he created using Midjourney.

“Someone steal these amazing designs to sell them on Mugs and T-Shirts, I really don’t care, this is AI art that’s been generated,” Bourdages wrote. “Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain.”
Bourdages tweet quickly racked up more than 37,000 likes and close to 6,000 shares.

In numerous follow-up tweets, Bourdages generated images of other popular characters from movies, video games, and comic books, including Darth Vader, Spider-Man, Batman, Mario, and Pikachu.

“More shirts courtesy of AI,” he added. “I’m sure, Nintendo, Marvel, and DC won’t mind, the AI didn’t steal anything to create these images, they are completely 100% original.”

Many users appeared to agree with Bourdages’ somewhat sarcastic interpretation, sharing T-shirts they created online that feature the AI images.
Bourdages later clarified that he had no intention of profiting off of the images, but noted that Midjourney had done so by charging him to use their service.
“Midjourney is a paid subscription btw, so technically the only one that profited off of this image is them,” he said. “I have no intentions of profiting off of or claiming any of these images. They belong to the AI, MJ, and the public, my contribution is that of a simple google search.”
Just two days after sharing the images, however, Bourdages stated on Twitter that he had suddenly lost his access to Midjourney.

“Update – I was refunded and lost access to Midjourney,” he said. “They are no longer profiting off of these images and I assume didn’t want copyrighted characters generated. I hope this thread created discussion around AI and where data is sourced.”
In further remarks, Bourdages reiterated his primary goal when creating the images.
“The obvious issue I am opposed to in my thread is the theft of human art,” he said. “People’s craftsmanship, time, effort, and ideas are being taken without their consent and used to create a product that can blend it all together and mimic it to varying degrees.”

The Daily Dot reached out to both Bourdages and Midjourney to inquire about the images but did not receive a reply by press time. Disney did not respond to questions either regarding whether it would attempt to claim copyright over AI-generated imagery.
The issue surrounding AI art has already led to widespread protest and pushback from the art community. Just this week, artists on the art-hosting platform ArtStation began uploading identical images en masse that featured the caption “NO TO AI GENERATED IMAGES.”
Given just how new the technology is, it remains unclear what guidelines, if any, will be created to balance the rights of artists against the ever-expanding capabilities of AI.

 

[Escaped Abortion]

I have never understood why commissions of trademarked properties were legal to sell.

I visited a "comics" store with a friend a few years back (In reality it was a Funko Pops, posters and "art" store with a few comics).
They had a bunch of "art" done by some local that was nothing but "Random Dr. Who character with Darth Vader", "Harry Potter fighting Darth Vader" and that sort of crap.

I do not understand how that is even supposed to be legal.
Same for about half of the T shirts that are made today.

It's not legal. Large companies would be required to crush them if they are made aware, but generally ignorance is bliss for all parties. Having your legal team go out and swat a fly that sold a couple of t-shirts of their fan art is going to cost way more than you will gain in damages, so it's easier to just pretend you don't see unless they draw too much attention to themselves.

Some sites like Teeturtle, seem to actually pay to license their characters, which is why the fan shirts have an upcharge compared to their in house products.

Every now and then you do hear about Disney making some day care paint over a mural they've done. Nintendo crushes larger scale projects, like remakes, but I have seen plenty of bootleg Pokemon shirts.
Back in the day I used to read a webcomic whose creator was absolutely insistent than no one dare draw fanart of his characters. He would destroy them. He was deathly afraid that a single piece of fanart would dillute his trademark. I think he chilled out a little over the years, but I'm not sure.

 

[ZazietheBeast]

This is exactly what Disney needs. Frivolous lawsuits when they themselves are in the middle of a collapse due to poor decisions, wokeness and Blackrock mandated insanity.

I wonder how this cuck would feel if his beloved corporation dies out.

 

[TowinKarz]

I do not understand how that is even supposed to be legal.
Same for about half of the T shirts that are made today.
I get that there is some protection for parody.

Yep, its covered under fair use.

However when you are making something that looks like it could be official merch, how is that a parody?

That's the legal definition OF parody under Fair Use - using the actual characters, the fact its identifiable is what protects it. Using only similar characters actually means the work could be considered derivative or satire and that actually ISN'T protected under fair use. To actually be a parody, you have to stay on-model for what you're parodying.

I assume it is just too much work for the copyright and trade mark owners to go after every web page & brick and mortar store selling this stuff so they don't bother.

That's most of it, but, there is a three-prong test, as I understand it, under Fair Use, to determine if its parody or not.

Determination of quantum and value of the matter (is it really parody?) , the purpose of recreation (was it created solely as a parody?), and the likelihood of competition between the two works are the three criteria that will be taken into consideration for a work to qualify for this defense

Now, I am NOT a lawyer here, but, it seems the third one is the "meat" of the issue: the "competition" part especially - which could basically be boiled down to a single question: Was the parody costing Disney any of their actual sales/income? Or could it conceivably do so?

A person buying a cheap Chinese bootleg T-shirt does, so that's why those are illegal, but a T-shirt where there's a lightsaber fight depicted between The Doctor and Darth Vader does not.

Why?

Every pirated tape costs Disney a potential sale of a legit one, or Disney+ sub or somesuch.

Since Disney does not sell Star Wars/ Dr. Who crossover merch, they can't be argued to have harmed Disney in any way, even if it does "look official" and more than a few people might have actually assumed it to be an actual Disney product. And nobody out looking for such a piece of crossover art would go TO the Disney Store for it as it's well known amongst the public such doesn't exist.

Much like how factual truth is an absolute defense against slander, not actually competing with the parodied subject's brand is an absolute defense against being sued for copyright violation under parody.

Now, if at some point in the future Disney were to buy up the Who license? Then they'd have to take that shit down. Or if the comic book shop in question was in Orlando, Florida, across the street from Disney? Yeah, they'd probably lose as they were going to get a lot of confusion sales by people assuming it was genuine.

But one shop, in the middle of nowhere, selling a few dozen a year or whatever? On the side, separate from their "main business"? Yeah, they're safe.

Again, this is how I understand it, and I'm not a lawyer, but, as long as your parody is sufficiently divested from the parent company's products, areas, scopes and works? You're safe behind enough of Fair Use that even the most mercenary of Junior Mouse Lawyer would not consider it worth the effort.


The reason the Micky Daycare Murals don't get protection is because by themselves, they aren't parody.

If he were part of a mural where animated icons from a half-dozen studios (like Bugs Bunny and Popeye) were all depicted being led away in handcuffs for "rotting children's minds" and that the kids should "read books instead", that'd probably survive under Fair Use, but I have no idea what kind of deranged daycare would ever paint that in the first place.

Again, not a lawyer, maybe a real one like @AnOminous can come by, score my work for me and prove why you should probably actually go to law school first before you open your yap on legal matters in the process.... but until then, enjoy the speculation for what it's worth.

 

[BrunoMattei]

@BrunoMattei lol
These guys not only regularly ruin their art and make parts of the game look worse, but they're shit at their jobs to begin with and their little roots and doodads they create get sculpted into game-ruining invisible barriers and stumbling blocks.

God damn Behavior is made up of so many faggots. It reminds me of the NFT drama with Pinhead a while ago.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

Do we have an "anti AI art" community? If we don't, we need one.

Even if Disney or another rights holder sues, they're not going to sue over the tool used to make the art. They're going to sue over you selling shit with their characters likeness on it. Any artist trying to defend themselves with "But I didn't actually draw it, the AI did, I just sold it!" is going to get slapped by the fact that selling it is the illegal part here.

I think it can go beyond that because the AI didn't do it on its own, it's not alive. Someone had to order it to do it. The equivalent would be making someone who works for you to do something illegal while you profit from that action, whatever it is.

 

[Tinnitus]

The soycialists always have no problem "stomping out capitalism" until 'their' money is at risk.

They stomped out modding because of money.

I´d be fine if AI generators go away if it the prices for art commissions or skins weren´t that fucking overpriced.

15$ for a skin when a character itself only costs 5$ is a scam. Both of them take the same-ish amount of work but one costs thrice the price of one.

 

[The Ugly One]

I'm no lawyer - but - it seems to me that you can't make a case that AI imagery is guilty of violating copyright when you are the ones deliberately and unequivocally telling it to do so. All that does is proves the AI really is AI, it's not smart enough to know when it's being asked to break a law, and that proves nothing in your favor.

Forcing AI to make copyrighted characters for you and then arguing that it somehow proves AI image generation is inherently illegal is as stupid as arguing the Chevy Equinox is inherently a dangerous vehicle by encouraging people to steal them and then use them as the getaway car in bank robberies.

AI isn't "really" AI. It's nothing more than a fancy interpolation function that's capable of blending huge amounts of data. Not much different in principle than fitting a curve to a bunch of data points. "Training an AI" just means adding more data points.

The term "AI" is being used to obfuscate what is really happening. It's no fundamentally different than using a morphed to choose the midpoint between two copyrighted images. This would be considered a derived work.

These AI people are trying to claim what they're doing is magic, and therefore not covered by copyright. But it actually should be. AI code generation just combines snippets of other people's code, and AI art just blends other people's art.

If an AI would report the data points that contributed most heavily to the outcome, every one of them would be shut down by lawsuits.

 

[DamnWolves!]

“Someone steal these amazing designs to sell them on Mugs and T-Shirts, I really don’t care, this is AI art that’s been generated,” Bourdages wrote. “Legally there should be no recourse from Disney as according to the AI models TOS these images transcends copyright and the images are public domain.”

But that doesn't even make sense. Disney owns the intellectual property rights to Mickey Mouse, not a specific image of Mickey Mouse. It doesn't matter if you drew the picture yourself, they own the rights to the character.

Bang on -- I'm not surprised that someone retarded enough to pick "artist" as their chosen career doesn't understand copyright at all, but US copyright law is based on a principle called "substantial similarity".

Like most things in law, it relies on the standard of "the reasonable person", because law needs to be flexible enough to handle new and unforeseen fact patterns (like this one): would a reasonable person recognize the expression to be substantially similar to the intellectual property of the copyright owner? In this case, the answer is obviously 'yes'.

Copyright law doesn't exist to limit expression; it exists to prevent the original author from being deprived of profiting from their work. Exceptions like parody recognize this explicitly, under the assumption that no owner of a serious work would parody itself or grant permission for someone else to do so, and courts have traditionally been very sensitive to whether the intent of the parody is to criticize vs. entertain (which may be the actual reason Weird Al asks permission--not because he's just a nice guy).

Boring law talk aside, I think it would be great if Disney relied on all those file sharing cases and sued this guy into the ground for facilitating copyright infringement--they can blow up his tweets on poster board and the case will be over.

 

[JackoVerde]

Anyone can draw Mickey Mouse as much as they like. You can't *sell merchandise* with Mickey Mouse on it, whether it was drawn by Leonardo DaVinci or fucking Skynet.

actually if it was drawn by leonardo da vinci himself, disney can get fucked and you can sell that as much as you want.
you just cant call it mickey mouse. you can call it Leonardo Da Micky or something like that.

 

[Safir]

Yep, its covered under fair use.

Not necessarily.

That's the legal definition OF parody under Fair Use - using the actual characters, the fact its identifiable is what protects it. Using only similar characters actually means the work could be considered derivative or satire and that actually ISN'T protected under fair use. To actually be a parody, you have to stay on-model for what you're parodying.

No. Any "reimagining", "reconceptualization", "commentary", "queering" can be parody with a generous enough helping of liberal arts bullshit. Steal a story, change one scene, say you did it because your reimagining recontextualizes and interrogates cisheteropatriarchal norms of the original, bam, parody. Fair use not guaranteed, though. The word "parody" doesn't even appear in § 107.

That's most of it, but, there is a three-prong test, as I understand it, under Fair Use, to determine if its parody or not.

Four-pronged test, and it's not for parody, it's for fair use itself.

and the likelihood of competition between the two works

It's called "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work", and:

Now, I am NOT a lawyer here, but, it seems the third one is the "meat" of the issue: the "competition" part especially - which could basically be boiled down to a single question: Was the parody costing Disney any of their actual sales/income? Or could it conceivably do so?

A person buying a cheap Chinese bootleg T-shirt does, so that's why those are illegal, but a T-shirt where there's a lightsaber fight depicted between The Doctor and Darth Vader does not.

Why?

Every pirated tape costs Disney a potential sale of a legit one, or Disney+ sub or somesuch.

Since Disney does not sell Star Wars/ Dr. Who crossover merch, they can't be argued to have harmed Disney in any way

It can and has been argued that using copyrighted characters financially hurts the creators / copyright owners, who spend resources on creating, acquiring and promoting the characters. It also eats into other Disney merch. No one cares that your customers wouldn't have bought any official Disney t-shirt because they ship Darth Vader and Doctor Who. It's a t-shirt with Darth Vader on it, and Disney's right to be the only seller of t-shirts with Darth Vader (even if they aren't currently selling any) must be protected. There's already a countably infinite number of products with Darth Vader that Disney isn't selling, and you can't pick up the slack just cos.

Much like how factual truth is an absolute defense against slander, not actually competing with the parodied subject's brand is an absolute defense against being sued for copyright violation under parody.

It's not, and you don't need to have a "brand" or be selling your work to have copyright protection. It doesn't even have to be published. If you wrote a novel and shelved it, and I found it and published a mocking of it for money, you have an even stronger case because it clearly doesn't require familiarity with the original. You can say, "these parts are verbatim and now people won't buy my hypothetical original book" or "these parts are paraphrased, but a reader can think they're verbatim and won't buy my hypothetical original book to see what I actually wrote", plus the whole matter of privacy and control. You just can't say point blank "my book won't sell well now because people think it's bad", this will get thrown out because 1A. But you can say "this cunt over there quoted all the funny parts and now people don't need to buy my book to mock it".

 

[Polentic]

This is some 5d chess bullshit.

Anyways, for the artists who think AI will replace your jobs, that is further from the truth. Here is a list of things AI can't do.

Spoiler: List

Porn
Black People
Specific 3d art styles
Animations

You are still in business you retards!

 

[YE24]

This is some 5d chess bullshit.

Anyways, for the artists who think AI will replace your jobs, that is further from the truth. Here is a list of things AI can't do.

Spoiler: List

Porn
Black People
Specific 3d art styles
Animations

You are still in business you retards!

Animations aren't that far off. https://ai.facebook.com/blog/generative-ai-text-to-video/

Porn has been explicitly (heh) excluded from the training corpus. No reason to believe we can't train an AI for it. Likewise for non-whites and specific art styles.

 

[The Ugly One]

Bang on -- I'm not surprised that someone retarded enough to pick "artist" as their chosen career doesn't understand copyright at all, but US copyright law is based on a principle called "substantial similarity".

Like most things in law, it relies on the standard of "the reasonable person", because law needs to be flexible enough to handle new and unforeseen fact patterns (like this one): would a reasonable person recognize the expression to be substantially similar to the intellectual property of the copyright owner? In this case, the answer is obviously 'yes'.

Copyright law doesn't exist to limit expression; it exists to prevent the original author from being deprived of profiting from their work. Exceptions like parody recognize this explicitly, under the assumption that no owner of a serious work would parody itself or grant permission for someone else to do so, and courts have traditionally been very sensitive to whether the intent of the parody is to criticize vs. entertain (which may be the actual reason Weird Al asks permission--not because he's just a nice guy).

Boring law talk aside, I think it would be great if Disney relied on all those file sharing cases and sued this guy into the ground for facilitating copyright infringement--they can blow up his tweets on poster board and the case will be over.

The problem isn't substantial similarity. It's that the algorithm is literally taking copyright works and using math to cut them up, distort them, blend them, merge them, etc to produce new images. The most relevant comparison here is sampling. It doesn't matter if you sample 250 songs and blend them, shift them, and phase them so as to make it really hard to tell which original songs were combined by you to make your new, hot beat. It's illegal if you do it without permission.

It's really obvious if you use a computationally lightweight AI. When I told Dall-E Mini to generate a cartoon mouse in the style of Walt Disney, it pretty clearly grabbed pictures of Mickey mouse, and probably Jerry and Nibbles as well, and combined them in a variety of ways. It didn't actually learn ol' Walt's personal style and draw in a way he might have drawn. The output is as though it did a Google image search for my input string, grabbed a bunch of images, and remixed them to produce the outcome.



If I take out the word, "cartoon," it's even more obvious. I guess Hanna-Barbera mouse drawings don't get caught this way.



If a human manually produced an image from copyrighted sources using similar operations in Photoshop, regardless of whether or not it was a recognizable cartoon mascot, it would be a copyright violation. So why should it be legal to use a piece of software to do it automatically?

 

[Zero Day Defense]

It doesn't matter if you sample 250 songs and blend them, shift them, and phase them so as to make it really hard to tell which original songs were combined by you to make your new, hot beat. It's illegal if you do it without permission.

That, right there? That's what makes your example firmly no different from regular song creation.

Art isn't made in a vacuum. You can't help but be influenced by works you've consumed in the past. Inevitably, we as humans also algorithmically "cut up, blend, distort, and merge" some indeterminate reservoir of past experiences in order to create new artworks. We normally don't even bother dissecting this process when we engage in it, though. We can't-- not totally.

AI art is strangely the same exact way-- if you want to prove me wrong, good luck following the way it generates images using its massive training data set and autonomously generated neural networks.

 

[Tasty Tatty]

If an AI would report the data points that contributed most heavily to the outcome, every one of them would be shut down by lawsuits.

Depends on where this is debated. There you have Richard Prince and his screenshots of pictures from Instagram to sell/show them as "original" art. It was considered derivative. And here, you're clearly seeing which images he used, many (if not every) times without asking permission.



A genius or an asshole?

And then, there was a photographer sperging on twitter because she couldn't copyright a pose. She was right complaining about people copying entirely her photographs, but she wanted to copyright the pose.


(second image is the one "based" on the original pic that is derivative enough to be sold).

There is a thin line between what's original and what's not here and cross it can be dangerous. Then, if I take a pic on Disneyland and sell it or use it for anything that implies profit, I can be sued because I'm using private property that doesn't belong to me (buildings, brands, etc.)

 

[The Ugly One]

That, right there? That's what makes your example firmly no different from regular song creation.

It's not, though. If somebody figures out you sampled their work, they can sue you, and if they prove you sampled it, they will win. It doesn't matter what you did to the samples, and rappers lose lawsuits over this all the time. Philosophical arguments about memories and experience being fundamentally the same as digital recordings don't matter; those recordings have copyrights, and the copyright covers sampling.

AI art is strangely the same exact way-- if you want to prove me wrong, good luck following the way it generates images using its massive training data set and autonomously generated neural networks.

ML fits nonlinear functions to distributions of data, and then evaluates those functions based on inputs. Your brain doesn't do this, because it is extremely bad at math. Also, it is not hard, in principle, to track how the parameters of that function are created, or how that function is evaluated given inputs. It's just prohibitive to do so for the extremely complex functions and very large data sets used for most production AI/ML. But you can do it explicitly for a toy-sized problem with a simple fitting function. Mathematically sophisticated AI/ML clients understand this and won't let their protected IP be used to train models. Almost any AI/ML project that can't scrape its training set from Google is running into this problem.

In fact, I've seen AI/ML projects where sophisticated nonlinear curves didn't work at all, so they just used a nearest neighbor function. That is, all they did was grab the element in the training set that had inputs closest to the user inputs. This is a really naive way to do AI/ML, but using such a trivial function is a difference of degree, not kind.

And no, it's not obviously legal. It's being tested in court right now:

This Copyright Lawsuit Could Shape the Future of Generative AI

Algorithms that create art, text, and code are spreading fast—but legal challenges could throw a wrench in the works.

www.wired.com

 

[Starved Artist]

This is some 5d chess bullshit.

Anyways, for the artists who think AI will replace your jobs, that is further from the truth. Here is a list of things AI can't do.

Spoiler: List

Porn
Black People
Specific 3d art styles
Animations

You are still in business you retards!

Porn, it can do. LORD THAT'S ALL I THOUGHT IT COULD DO FOR THE FIRST MONTH. I can't post it since I've asked the Mods. Risque shit with spoilers is the hard limit for the site.
Porn people are flipping the fuck out and no place wants to host the endless porn you can generate. Also, I think a lot of people have ripped their dicks off and rubbed their clits smooth in the last month due to the furry update.

Black people, it can do it. You just need a model that's been properly edited OR trained with more black people than 5. Another flaw with doing black people is that it only gives 4 hair styles and you need a lot of negatives and merged porn checkpoints to get multiple hairstyles going.

The last one was the first Black Women my wife generated without using Negative prompts. I've ran the image through so many identifier services and it can't pull a solid match on any human.

Animations, it can do. It can even do pixel animations and sprite sheets lmao.

It can even do obscure 3D Art


Yeah. Shitty concept artists and shit 3D artists and Tranny Pixel artists SHOULD be afraid of Ai. Don't need them and they can't hold things hostage anymore.
I can tell you what Ai cannot do, but I won't. My art style is perfectly safe and I'm enjoying the tears.

 

[Bankman]

I like playing with these AI tools. Plus, it's really cool being able for someone like me without any artistic talent or skill to generate off-the-wall stuff. It would be a shame if the usual suspects regulate it out of existence.

Here's one I "made" earlier.

 

[Zero Day Defense]

It's not, though. If somebody figures out you sampled their work, they can sue you, and if they prove you sampled it, they will win.

Emphasis mine.

The case you provided made it so that such a task is borderline impossible, to speak less of it being worth it. Also, there's a reason why I used the term "algorithmically" rather than "mathematically"-- the process that the human goes through may not involve explicit math, but we're still talking about at least borderline inscrutable processes in both cases.

ML fits nonlinear functions to distributions of data, and then evaluates those functions based on inputs. Your brain doesn't do this, because it is extremely bad at math.

pfft

Maybe your brain is bad at math.

...okay, my brain is bad at math, too.

Also, it is not hard, in principle, to track how the parameters of that function are created, or how that function is evaluated given inputs. It's just prohibitive to do so for the extremely complex functions and very large data sets used for most production AI/ML.

Which is exactly why I said:

good luck following the way it generates images using its massive training data set and autonomously generated neural networks.